


It's a Habit, A Good Hunter is Well Loved by Animals

by t0talcha0s



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Animals, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Just some Gon Freecss Hijinks, Pre-Canon and During-Canon, whale island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29552196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t0talcha0s/pseuds/t0talcha0s
Summary: Gon never really grew up with the possibility of a best friend. It was him and it was his family and it was the wilderness that raised him. It wasn't until after he'd left the Island, after her returned with his boy, that he realized it was shaping him for his best friend the entire time.
Relationships: Gon Freecs & Killua Zoldyck, Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	It's a Habit, A Good Hunter is Well Loved by Animals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neverwherever](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverwherever/gifts).



> Dedicated to my roomie, I treasure being able to write by your side. You're my constant inspiration and my driving force. Enjoy this little morsel

There were marks on the trees, a criss-cross of claw marks gouged into the bark. The ever-always buzz of tropical flies was quieted. There was an unfamiliar whooping from the speckled squirrels. Gon, six, fluffy-haired and wide eyed, barely recognized that anything was out of the ordinary. There were lots of seasonal changes on Whale Island, lots of little signs and superstitions that explained and warned the changes of the wildlife. Gon didn’t yet know them all, will never assume he does. There’s a cub, about as long as Gon’s shoe, teeth as sharp as sewing needles and Gon doesn’t understand why he shouldn’t just pick it up. It’s soft and small and fits in Gon’s boyhood hands like it’s meant to be there. Though it scrapes at his shoulders and pools blood in the fabric of his t-shirt. It’s meant to be there, he knows it. 

Mito is not happy with the new addition to the household. She frowns at Gon as he walks in the front door holding the cub, still scratching, still clawing, to his chest. Her voice is all concern and worry

“Where were you?” she asks, then she notices: the blood, the foxbear. “Gon put that down!” She rushes to him and as she attempts to remove the cub from his hands he presses it tighter to his shoulder. The cub howls, in pain or in fright, and the claw marks on his shoulder grow more numerous. “It’s dangerous Gon.” 

“It hasn’t hurt me!” 

“You’re bleeding, your shoulder, Gon give it to me darling.” 

“It hasn’t hurt me. It’s just scared.”

“Gon,” Mito says, all patience and understanding in her voice. “It is hurting you because it is scared. You’ve got to give it some space to feel comfortable.” She held her hands out and Gon, full of stubborn refusal and care, wouldn’t hand her the cub. She sighed, got up from her position by him and went into the other room. Gon held the cub close, eased up a little but it still scratched nasty little lines into his skin. Mito returned with a shoebox, stuffed with scraps of sheets. Old sheets, from Gon’s bed when he was young. She knelt in front of her boy and held the box out to him. Finally, reluctantly, Gon laid the cub into the fabric. It wailed and scratched and hiccuped, eventually settling into an unhappy restfulness. 

“Well I guess we have a foxbear now.” Mito laughed, incredulous and amazed and asked him, when he was settled with the shoebox in his lap, feeding the cub with a milk-soaked cotton ball. “What do you want to name them?” Gon thought for a while, deep in consideration looking down at the fuzzy little face atop his knees. The big brown eyes, the sharp point of his claws. 

“Kon.” He said, happy and decided and Mito laughed, bright like the tickle of lambs-ear weeds.   
-

There is a little brown nuthatch skipping little hops across Gon’s bedroom windowsill. He’s always left the windows open, no screens in a house as old as the Freecss’, one of the first family’s on Whale Island, one of the first homesteads on its shores. Gon puts birdseed on the sill of his window, right above the flower boxes Mito tends like his siblings. The morning-calls of birds wakes him each day-break, the hoots of owls resting him to sleep. 

The nuthatch has a big red-brown splotch seeping into the feathers under its left wing. It hops off-center. Gon isn’t yet old enough to understand the pain of true injury, the lack of autonomy that comes with hurt. But, knowing the hurt bird won’t have the strength or agility to escape him, Gon reaches his hands under the bird’s ribcage and gently lifts it off the sill and up into the house. 

He takes it to Abe, in the kitchen, where she cleans the wound with a wet paper towel to get a better look. The bird squeaks and struggles, kicking its little feet out from under its feathers. 

“It’s just a cut.” Abe says. “Must have been a thorn or a tooth or something, not to worry. It’ll be right as rain in a few days.” 

So Gon lets it go back into the wild and watching it willing hop away, happy to be away from him he feels a little sad. That night, to the hoots of owls, he dreams of giant hands coming to lift him from his bed. 

-

Gon doesn’t have any friends, not really. There’s Noko but she’s younger than he is and her family isn’t quite so… brave. They’re a dock family, not used to the twisted wildways of the Island, not used to the murky rivers and broad roots. She doesn’t like to play in the dirt and she doesn’t like to fish and she prefers to sit on the side of the docks and read and embroider and that stuff’s boring. So Gon plays alone and makes acquaintances with the millipedes and the lava flies and the squirrels.

In the forest he climbs trees. Hugs his long legs to the trunks and shimmies up into the canopies. There’s a tree, near one of the riverways down in the wetlands of Whale Island’s sloped back, that has the perfect configuration of branches to climb. Gon hops foot after foot up to the tip and, waving in the breeze, he feels like he’s somewhere else. There’s a great roiling green tide beneath him. All of the leaves combine into a waving sea. It drops off, at the edge of the forest, a branched escarpment like the edge of the world. The salt-wind moistens his cheeks and sends the tree-limbs thrashing. A ladybug climbs its way up his neck and over the cuff of his ear and through the salt on his face he laughs. 

On the shore he dives deep into the silt of the ocean floor. He swam out so far once, tucked neat against the bottom of the sea, that he saw the great drop off where the rocky edge of the volcanic formation which makes up the island gives way to the abyss. Then, after taking a breath at the surface, he swam past it. Out in the deep, in the wide expanse of blue blue blue that was everything in front of him Gon opened his mouth and let the sea water find its place in the gaps of his body. There was nothing in front of him, just a gradient of clear wide blue. A young eel, barely grown but longer than Gon still, brushed against his leg as it swam back to its rocky home. 

On the cliffside, in the tangle root and rock that spotted his backyard a salamander wriggled its way across his thumb. In the marketplace a ship-rat ran head first into his boot. Trudging his way through the marshes after his fishing line snapped he ran into a turtle stuck in its tracks. He picked the creature up and set it onto drier land to continue its slow trek across the island. The turtle, angry at the touch, even under the guise of help, snapped at him and gouged a neat little diamond into his hand. 

-

“Sailors” Mito reminds him every summer when port is busiest and Gon often gets lost in the yarns and the bravado and the energy of it all “are not always your friends, Gon. If someone seems sketchy or tries to get you away from the docks or wants you to get on a boat with him don’t go. Come find me at the bar, okay?” 

“Aunt Mito,” he sighed, exasperated. Gon felt nowhere safer than Whale Island. What he was scared of was boredom. Mito cuts him off with a shake of the head. 

“I mean it Gon, I do. I know you’re tough and I trust you but, for me okay? Stay safe for me. I don’t know what I’d do if you got hurt.” He didn’t get it, he’d always run wild without supervision. All of the children on Whale Island did. From the memories Abe recounted it sounded like it's always been that way, with her sons and with Ging and with Mito too. But there was something in Mito’s eyes, like the reflection of newspaper print, that made him nod his head. 

“I will,” he said, “I’ll even pinky promise.” She laughed and put her arms around him, pulled him in tight to her chest. 

“I believe you. Thank you Gon.”

-

On top of a tree in the marshes Gon sits with a baby rabbit curled up sleeping beside the arch of his shoe, there are two squirrels play-fighting at his back, scampering up his shoulder for comfort, twin doves atop his hat of leaves, the flapping wings of butterflies, the prickle of a mantis resting on his wrist. More important than any of them, Gon’s focused entirely consumed by the bite on the end of his line. That’s the master down there, the master of the swamp. A birthright he didn’t even know he possessed, a crustacean disguised as a fish with eight twitching legs and spines dripping down the center of its back. It was an imposing creature and Gon had never seen it. Now though, he felt the careful probing of interest at his bait. He is hardly ever patient, he has hardly ever had to be, but yet his muscles are frozen-flexed in the coiled state before a battle. 

Then the master’s on for real and Gon jumps up so quickly it startles away the rest of his animal friends who had trusted him in his half-comatose zen fishing state. He leaps from his branch, twisting his line about the tree for leverage. And then it’s surfacing. Larger than a shark and larger than Gon’s bed the master breaches the water and the splash from the force of him is high enough to splatter across Gon’s face. Muddy water thrown into his eyes. Gon winces and laughs and pulls. 

The master is almost too heavy to carry, even for a boy with the genes of a Freecss, even with the structural legacy of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather etched into his sinew. But he squats and lifts and his legs are lighter than air because he’s done what Mito asks and that means he finally gets to _leave_

It’s not that he dislikes Whale Island, he treasures his home and his family, but he knows there’s more out there. He’s seen it on the tops of trees, in the blood from a turtle, the horror headlines in the weekly paper.

-

Killua Zoldyck, with his big blue eyes and his tuft of white hair and his skinny legs reminds Gon of something halfway between an exotic crane and a lynx cub. He’s all fluff and teeth and Gon thinks it’s funny when Killua tries to boss him around and then gets a little huffy when he realizes Gon’s not going to acquiesce. He’s all sharp edges and knobby knees and when they share a bunk on the ship ride from the shadow of Heaven’s Arena to the technicolor shores of Whale Island Killua’s elbows poke into Gon all night and he doesn’t even mind. 

Gon steps off the boat and it’s like time has stopped again, like all those months of adventure and horror and pain and love were erased and it’s just another Sunday where he’s heading to the market to pick up wine and yarn for Abe. Then he turns around. And it’s the Whale Island sky, all fluffy clouds with hidden storms and waves that lap and erode and boats that knock against each other deadly whenever some inexperienced sailor tries to take the quick way around the island and ends up in the deadly eddy that swirls around the Whale’s mouth. And suddenly there’s Killua, next to him. A little bit taller than he is and unimpressed by the cracked concrete of the pavement. Always so grumpy, his best friend, always looking for the worst in the world. Gon smiles at him though and it causes a quick flash of pink to light across his cheekbones and Gon has to hold back a laugh.

“This way Killua!” he calls “Don’t tell my aunt but we’re taking the long way home.” 

“Why’re we taking the long way?” He swats away the gnats that try to cling to the arms of his t-shirt.

“Because there’s so much to show you! Because I’m home and that means all of Whale Island so that means you’ve got to see all of it! We can start in Kon’s territory, he might not want to meet you because he doesn’t know you but I think we can catch a glimpse. But he might like you because I like you and that’s not nothing.” 

“Can’t believe you named it after yourself.”

“I was a little kid! Besides it’s Kon, with a ‘K’, like you! He may not be as big as Mike but he’s really cool!” Gon smiles at him again, partially because Killua’s not used to it and partially because he means it. Killua’s something new to the island but it feels like all this time the constriction of the island was gouging a space in Gon’s side just so Killua could slot in perfectly. So Gon grabs his best friend’s wrist and runs; off into the trees and the lakes and the wind with his boy by his side.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Gon Freecss more than most tangible things in my life. I know some of y'all feel the same. HMU with a comment! I love literally nothing more than hearing what you guys think!


End file.
